Do virtual worlds ever fail?
This seems a simple question if you answer it in purely commercial terms. As products, some virtual worlds fail completely, never even making it to the marketplace. (I was astonished to see that the developers of Atriarch still claim that the game is forthcoming, but there are at least a few designs and products that have been announced by developers or publishers and then definitively cancelled.)
Other commercial virtual worlds have failed commercially after publication, but here the standard gets a bit murkier. Simply being closed down isn’t a failure by definition, nor is having a very small customer base. If at some point in the future, the lights at Ultima Online get turned off, the game will have been a major commercial success. A Tale in the Desert has never had a huge subscriber base, but I don’t believe that either its designers nor its players have expected it to succeed on that scale. On the other hand, I think classing Earth and Beyond, Auto Assault and Asheron’s Call 2 as commercial failures is not a controversial gesture. Whatever their designers expected of them in commercial terms, they have to have fallen short and were closed relatively quickly.
This assertion opens up a more difficult and ultimately unanswerable set of questions, however, about the commercial expectations surrounding virtual worlds which have had a much longer life. Many of us assume that Star Wars: Galaxies has been a commercial disappointment for Sony Online Entertainment, and the developers said as much when defending their decision to completely alter the fundamentals of its design. Given that World of Warcraft has established that the potential subscriber base for virtual worlds in North America and Western Europe is potentially much larger than was commonly assumed at the time of the “first-generation” games like Ultima Online and Everquest, many publishers now may expect far more of any virtual world product than it is likely to deliver.
Falling short of expectations is not necessarily failure, however. Thinking about this question in financial terms is too limited. If it was a simple question of profit, measured on balance sheets, perhaps more publishers might be more directly forthcoming with figures on performance. But publishers cloud the issue not merely because of their competitors, but because the perception of relative success or disappointment has such a strong impact on the collective and individual psychology of players, affecting not just whether they continue to subscribe, but how they regard the work of live management. Players generate stories about the aesthetics of virtual worlds, about the experience of playing and practicing within them, based in part on their impressionistic view of whether or not the game is “working as intended” and whether that intention was a coherent or successful one in the first place.
This gets even more complicated if we're talking about a virtual world whose major intent was non-commercial, intended as art or provocation or research. In the latter case, in fact, negative results are just as valuable as positive ones, though scholars sometimes struggle to accept that principle.
If Auto Assault or Asheron’s Call 2 are commonly used as benchmarks for failure by heavily invested MMOG players, that is not only because they failed commercially, but because players are able to connect a received wisdom about how the internal design of those games produced their untimely demise. For example, one of the common claims about the failure of Auto Assault is a poor match between the imaginative expectations of players conditioned by films like The Road Warrior and the use of a standard DikuMUD class “trinity” (tank, heal, DPS) to structure the gameplay. Players who regard the PvP-centric game Shadowbane as a failure (often with some sympathy for its aspirations) will often talk about its technical shortcomings, but also about some bad design decisions such as the layout of the initial world map or the heavy reliance on PvE grinding to support PvP activities.
This is a different meaning of “expectations”. Players arrive in new virtual worlds with expectations that they derive from source fictions or genres. They arrive expecting something that is very much like another virtual world or is very much antagonistic to established models or play mechanics. They expect a sense of progression in the form or genre of virtual worlds themselves, or they expect simply that what has become standard will be maintained as such.
For the initial few months that a new commercial world is live, players struggle with each other on forums and on game channels about these expectations, trying to determine a consensus view both about what it is reasonable to expect and whether or not that has been delivered. Playing Age of Conan over the last week, I’ve been following the rough and tumble of those discussions on the New Player Help channel, where they ebb and flow like waves. In one night, several self-declared “hardcore” refugees from World of Warcraft complain that they have fled WoW’s alleged catering to casual players and are disappointed to find that Age of Conan does the same. Angry replies from players who love the gameplay of a particular class in Conan, or who prefer the visual aesthetic of Conan, rise in response. Later in the same evening, critics who know the Conan mythology will complain, and in reply, defenses that range from a practical disdain for the value of lore to praise for many aspects of the game’s implementation of Conanesque themes.
On one hand, this conversation is no different than other spirited public contests over the value of other cultural works, many of which also have a serious effect on commercial success and are therefore anxiously observed and manipulated by cultural producers, often in self-defeating ways. On the other, because virtual worlds are ongoing, mutating experiences defined by continuous practice (and monthly subscriptions), the argument about failure or success is both more fraught and in perpetual motion, affecting not just the fortunes of a single product but the future expectations that players will have about the next product.
For example, I’m trying to decide for myself whether it’s right for me to expect Age of Conan to be anything more than a modest redesign of World of Warcraft, and how disappointed I ought to be at its slavish use of numerous visual and game-mechanical conventions established or perfected by Blizzard’s designers. I’m not even clear where that feeling is coming from. Some of it is the same response a middlebrow film critic might have about a disappointing film, an aesthete’s complaint. Some of it is a judgment about the commercial viability of the game, an argument that a modest redesign of World of Warcraft is a poor strategy in this marketplace, since a new product by nature cannot compete with the technical polish and content depth of Warcraft unless it offers some dramatically new kind of experience or gameplay. And some of it is a social researcher’s intuition that Age of Conan doesn’t have the foundation or the scaffolding to generate novel forms of player sociality or organization, which isn’t anything that I could reasonably expect or ask of a commercial product.
It’s easier for me to describe Pirates of the Burning Sea as hovering on the borderland of failing not only because it was visibly struggling to retain its subscriber base when I last entered the game, but also because I had a very clear view by the time I stopped following it about what the structural and mechanical problems were with the game design, and how relatively irresolvable they were given the developers’ approach and resources. Pirates offers an interesting view of how an evolving consensus about a virtual world’s design can narrow all future development choices. Fewer subscribers constrains resources, but it also locks live management into a cycle of dependency and limitation with the players who remain, who by definition forgive the product of all its faults, or in fact see no such faults in defiance of what the now-absent former subscribers might have felt.
There is no virtual world that has failed so totally that it lacked ardently devoted citizens. Even vaporware virtual worlds often have fans who defend the object of their affection. Here, suddenly, virtual worlds remind us of other lost causes: nations have yet to be, sovereignties that have ceased to exist, utopias and communes, pyramid schemes and get-rich dreams. In the end, failed social experiments and institutions have the same problem as failed virtual worlds: all they are left with, in the end, are fervid, dangerous dreamers locked in a spiraling embrace with self-interested prophets and leaders who burned all their bridges back to the larger world.
Depends on your definition of failure, I guess. I've been in really crappy situations that, directly afterwards, I wished I had avoided. But, years later, realized were terrifically educational for me. I've had relationships that ended badly, but that provide me, to this day, with great memories from when they were fresh.
If everyone lost money, if the builders don't put it on their CV's, if players, on average, were disappointed with the cost/benefit, and if nobody learned anything that helped make the next one better... I'd call that a failure.
So, yeah... Auto Assault was a failure ;-)
Posted by: Andy Havens | Jul 28, 2008 at 16:44
The connection with other kinds of social experiments (communes, cults, or cliques in high school) strikes me as apt, especially if you add in a touch of cognitive dissonance. In the end the social aspects of virtual worlds are rather bootstrapped into existence by folks in networked proximity and success as a game, a world or just an aesthetic experience probably does account for much in terms of pure sociality (if there were such a thing).
But then isn't this also an old methods problem again too? How many freako auto assault lovers does it take before one can say "well it lost money, and it stunk on every objective measure but some folks sure had a real good time"?
In sociology there is a variation on the issue of virtual world failure that relates to the study of all social experiments - when is a social group a in fact a social group or the converse - when is a social group a failure at being a social group? Same thing no.
Posted by: Bart Simon | Jul 28, 2008 at 21:06
Yeah, exactly. I don't mind passing judgement, but precisely because these are such insistently social forms, it's not an aesthetic judgement. To talk about social failure, you're going to need social theory--and an argument about what is socially good, generative, emancipatory, desirable. That can be "whatever people do is desirable", that public preferences reveal something important about desire, choice, agency. But it's not just about "this makes for a good game".
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Jul 28, 2008 at 21:29
Lets get all french on this one. Is the Author dead in the MUD?
By this I mean, WHOS perspective are we measureing success by?
Take for instance a favorite around here. Second Life.
To MY opinion, the thing is a dismal obstruction to a much more interesting dream of VR. Total freedom. It sticks dollar signs in front of social and conceptual mobility, and in that respect, TO MY MIND, represents an unwelcome invasion of the virtual by capital.
But to Linden Labs, the Anshe Cheung's and the others of SL, its a triumph, for precisely the same reasons.
Clearly this little post-marxist duck and LL don't see eye to eye.
But who's right. Why should I *care* if LL see it as a successs (perhaps other than as a gaming of the odds of investments in future VRs). What I care about is *MY* visions of VR.
Posted by: dmx | Jul 29, 2008 at 01:19
Nice post, very well written. I especially like the last paragraph. Depressing, but well written. Not that I'm one to comment on depressing posts, but...
Games at a basic level tend to require hardcore server and bandwidth resources. So as long as there's someone willing to pay for that... and it surprises me actually just how effective community involvement and donations can be. Very much NOT let do, squeeze every penny of profit type of set up. It is art, though, so I don't know why I would be surprised.
So yeah a virtual tree falls in a virtual forest, playSound still gets called even if there are no players... right?
I think a pure peer-to-peer virtual world would not only be immortal it would be unkillable. If it could live at all, that is.
Posted by: robusticus | Jul 29, 2008 at 11:03
I think you can say with a fair deal of confidence that a world, that has been cancelled before it went live, has failed. It can be a success from the academic/research point of view, as to "Why did it fail?"; however, this would be what we call "learning from mistakes".
Posted by: Nicholas Chambers | Jul 30, 2008 at 05:56
Great post! I think that we can analyze degrees or success or failure by looking at specific aspects of the virtual world, without necessarily resorting to player's opinions about them. Let's take Age of Conan's supposedly branching NPC dialog system, one of the features which is often touted by Funcom as a core selling point. How can one unashamedly call this “branching” when, really, all branches lead to one of two outcomes: accepting the quest/reject the quest. If I choose the offensive option in my multiple-choice quest gathering test I might be told to bugger off, or asked to choose again. If I am dismissed by the NPC all I have to do is click again and choose the servile option. What is the point of investing resources in producing text that if followed goes against the entire structure of progression in the game: ie gathering XP and leveling? So in this way, I would say that the basic level-based structure of AoC is at odds with one of its core selling features. It wants to be innovative but its few innovations are either inconsequential or clash with the borrowed structural conventions of other MMOGs. Although a rather crude and overly summarized argument, one could say that, at least in terms of gameplay design, AoC is a failure but it displays structural incoherences that undermine the features its developers had been bragging about during production.
The question here would be, should the intentions and aspirations of designers feature into an analysis of a virtual world? Sticking to continental post-structuralist literary theory, the answer would be a resounding NO, the text stands on its own and we should treat it on its own merits. But when the text is not only text but a society, things become far more complicated...
Posted by: Gordon Calleja | Aug 01, 2008 at 05:27
success = (cost of development) + expectations
It seems that you need to (at least) break even to succeed. Also, I would think that you need to achieve whatever initial vision you had for the virtual world. So success seems to be dependent on definitions provided at the developer side of the game.
When we (as consumers) say game X is a failure because of Y I think we are using the wrong terminology. The game isn't a failure - it may not fun - or it's not interesting - or it's too complicated - all of which influence the number of subscribers which in turn affects the revenue stream. A lower than expected subscriber base might lead a game company to label a particular virtual world a 'failure' or a higher than expected base a 'success.'
So virtual worlds fail whenver they fail to meet their target subscriber base and fall short of realizing their vision.
Posted by: thoreau | Aug 01, 2008 at 07:02
I think Thoreau has a good point, however, I would argue that a project, which didn't meet the expectations of the creator, yet exceeded in an unexpected field, could also be considered a success. Example:
- ExampleSoft builds a VW called ExampleVW, expecting to have at least 100 000 subscribers during its Golden Age.
- ExampleVW never breaks the 100k line and goes offline
- ExampleVW does however introduce an innovative tutorial system, which soon gets adopted in every 3rd school in Europe for teaching 2nd grade arithmetics
Did ExampleVW really fail? Did it fail as a game? Or did it just fail as a commercial product?
Posted by: Nicholas Chambers | Aug 01, 2008 at 11:12
i think it's odd, frankly, to compare commercial VW's with the fantastic idea of success or failure to any actual success or failure of the VW itself.
most times, the classic entrepreneurship of those companies trying to market VW's fails to live to expectations of success, because of any number of sociological or economical concerns, let alone the expectations of commercial success by launching designed solutions to "bait consumers" rather than "attract players".
without the pressure of having to "compete", many of those now-dead VW's and MMO experiences may actually be quite enjoyable and compelling experiences, if it weren't for the fact those people hated having to spend $300/yr on subscription costs and/or RMT extras.
and does the lack of business success indicate failure ?
i think there are a lot of instances where the MMO environment was shaped by failures both social and financial, i.e. the early avatar based social-chat environments, right up to games like star wars galaxies, which had a quite steady rise in players until market forces transpired to redesign the game and rework the entire VW around the players, or like vanguard, tabula rasa, lord of the rings online, etc. which promise quite a lot of content and experiences with the aim towards increasing player numbers over time, but never quite delivered or succeeded due to numerous risks and pressures to compete.
i don't believe the best measure of a VW is financial success, but perhaps the reverse is true, that financial success can come from successful VW's, that if the actual experience and immersion into that experience is compelling and structured, you can create a personal success from that achievement.
but so can a lot of things once you have that requisite audience that is compelled to return and interact in that particular VW. so, should we be trying to rate MMO's on their immersive capabilities, i.e. functional socialising, roleplaying, or trading elements to determine if they are going to fail to be productive, functional, or utilised past a certain point.
perhaps not. it would take the fun out of random speculation and archetypal research on things like RMT impacts and progressive/degenerative sociological discussion that encourages the wrong kind of people, those not actually interacting or enjoying the experience of the VW, but rather passionately evaluating an experience with a limited set of tools at their disposal.
Posted by: Michael | Aug 07, 2008 at 03:36
Wow, someone remembers Atriarch? I spent years working on that game. There were some great ideas involved, most of which came from the original tiny team.
They still claimed development was ongoing when they 'temporarily' let all of the team who weren't actually working for their networking company go.
Sadly, fans still lurk in the IRC channel where we used to do dev chats, unwilling to admit that it will never be released. Some sociology major should use them for a study.
Posted by: A. Non | Aug 16, 2008 at 18:37
As a value judgement in response to the main question posed in this article, I think it's *good* that virtual worlds fail, and that yes, objectively, virtual worlds do fail. The moment that the connection is unplugged and the virtual world ceases to be part of the landsape of virtual realities, it has failed no matter how successful it had ever been. Intrinsic in the concept of "Virtual World" is longevity--that it persists for a reason and a purpose. I might even go so far to say that success in any given virtual world is only a matter of existence: it exists, or it doesn't exist.
I think we have to believe that virtual worlds are still in their infancy--what does the next century hold, let alone next decade. We are presently staring the big bang in the face and it is going to take a lot of trial and error to see which of these virtual worlds becomes a sustainable and integrated version of our reality.
Posted by: M | Aug 28, 2008 at 11:40
There are plenty of new startups for MMORPG or games in general, many projects seem to fail because of the lack of funding, while this is a shame that games never reach the end user while plenty of efforts went into the development of them it stays economy wise a business venture where capital and funding are a part of. A good thing that the development of innovative virtual reality keeps growing as time goes on and there is good interest from many startups into this segment of the market.
Posted by: Majestic | Oct 06, 2008 at 22:48
There are plenty of new startups for MMORPG or games in general, many projects seem to fail because of the lack of funding, while this is a shame that games never reach the end user while plenty of efforts went into the development of them it stays economy wise a business venture where capital and funding are a part of. A good thing that the development of innovative virtual reality keeps growing as time goes on and there is good interest from many startups into this segment of the market.
Posted by: Majestic | Oct 06, 2008 at 22:49